life in the 21st century, personal technology, free agent nation, social web...

Ryze

Mar 29, 2004

A member of Ryze wrote me today asking me what I would recommend to him in terms of how to get the most out of Ryze. I got so carried away on the subject, that it was obvious that I needed to post my observations and recommendations here.

This isn't earthshaking stuff, but I would have gotten a quicker start at Ryze myself if I would have known these things to begin with:

1. Spend some time there every week. Things build with time and regularity.

2. Carefully pick 1-3 networks to participate in actively. You may want to reserve time looking for a good one, but once you've found one, I would read a few months worth of posts (depending on the volume) to understand what they are talking about and who the major participants are and then start posting good, helpful, thoughtful comments and ideas. Let yourself be known on the network(s). It's easy to spread yourself thin and never get known anywhere but I've found that people read your posts with more interest once they *know* you.

3. Be as open as you feel comfortable with so that people will be able to establish a one-sided relationship with you simply from checking you out on your page. Be personal. Be appropriate. Get ideas for your page by looking at other pages. People refer other people to my page because they think it is a useful page.

4. Keep up with your guestbook entries on your own page. Once you get going, it's easy to fall behind. Make short upbeat GB entries in return to everyone (you can provide advice to those whose entries seem offensive and encouragement to newbies, etc.) and invest additional time in especially thoughtful guestbook entries based on what you find at the other person's page for the people you would really like to connect with.

5. Browse Ryze for interesting people. You can search on interests, see who the friends of a person you like a lot are and find interesting people from their posts in networks. When you find someone interesting, make a guestbook entry in their page or send them a private message, whichever seems most appropriate. I found that Ryze is more interesting the more public people are in their communications, so I've leaned towards making guestbook entries unless it was clearly better to use a private channel.

6. I also entered testimonials and tips myself as I learned about Ryze and that drew attention to me and brought hits my way. [Ryze has a large rotating set of tips and testimonials that Ryzers can submit]

7. Also, I have a weblog and wrote a fairly elaborate set of posts about Ryze and social networking [Social Networking Made Easy, Part 3] which caught the eye of Ryze founder, Adrian Scott, and he requested to use a big excerpt from my post on his welcome to Ryze for beginners page. That gives me lots of hits.

8. Be open and interested regarding promoting your own business, but first focus on connecting, being interested, being helpful and expressing yourself.

Jan 28, 2004

I'm afraid that most of the enthusiasts for social networking services are beginning to get fed up. These services, now abbreviated YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service) are proliferating like rabbits and its getting frustrating. First the programmers and entrepreneurs, then the bloggers, then the press and more recently Venture Capitalists have gotten hot and bothered about the potential of all these services.

On the one hand, I'm glad we get to play and experiment with these little social networking environments, but people skip around and spread their energy and attention so widely with no cross-talk between the services. Especially for people like me who want to try lots of these services. I get stretched too thin and my online *friends* seem equally stretched and enthusiasm is dropping like a rock.

My real world friends have given these services little attention. Maybe I'm not in the right age group, but I couldn't recruit more than a couple friends onto Ryze and haven't hardly tried with the others. It's not like the others (LinkedIn, Friendster, Tribe et al.) had so much more to recommend them that I could say, nevermind about Ryze, this new one is IT.

I've given most attention to Ryze (of which I've been a gold member since Mar-03, but have to admit that when I started blogging around the beginning of May, most of my free *online networking* energy has been spent either blogging, perusing other blogs or commenting on other blogs. Once you have a blog, you're committed in a way that being a member of these communities doesn't come close to unless perhaps you are the moderator of a network that is active. [See my Blogging as Social Networking post.]

These YASNS just aren't very good yet. Maybe they never will be. But they seem to need more than profiles, testimonials, photos, explicit friend networks and bulletin boards to go very far. There needs to be more to do on these things. More ways to get to know people and interact with them. To build trust. To provide support.

Most importantly, these communities need to be linked. These gated networks aren't working. It's frustrating to fill in profiles over and over again. It's impossible to get your real friends to monkey around with all these different communities and spend time filling in profiles and inviting friends.

We either need a much better YASNS that kicks butt and stands out as the one worth joining so people aren't fragmented so much in relatively equal and limited islands. Or, we need some decent standards and EASY ways to join multiple YASNS. And forget it if you want me to pay for all these different ones. That's not happening. I'm about ready to drop my gold membership on Ryze because I'm really not getting much use out of it.

What if my friends join different individual YASNS and invest their time in the particular one or ones they join. They want me to get on their YASNS and I want them to get on mine. We either stubbornly stick with our own first choice or switch or join both.

What I'm trying for is to get my actual friends networked together online so I can see and benefit from explicitly identifying and knowing who the friends of my friends are and so on (4 deep is the absolute maximum of interest and 3 deep (which is just the friends of my friends) is a great starting point.

The latest YASNS, Google affiliated no less, is Orkut. Some are praising it. I still think there's social gold in these hills but am not sure were going to find much of it with the current explosion of new services. Too much already.

May 26, 2003

This entry is part of a series on social networking, please go back at least one notch and skim part 2, for background. This complete thread starts with 6 degrees of separation.

Getting to know people: this simple structure of personal pages on Ryze, makes it easy to get to know quite a bit about people who interest or attract you. You can use the search and link functions to identify candidates for connection and then view their pages to check them out. It feels a lot like shopping - for interesting people. I guess you could say that, in this way, Ryze is a kind of mall or bazaar. It's fun. You now have a warm and fuzzy enough feeling about an interesting person, to venture a contact.

Establishing Contact: This is key. Most of us don't like this part in real life - meeting strangers. Here, we are way ahead of the game because we know a lot about these "strangers" before we attempt to make contact - we've picked out the ones who look most promising. We can ask them about something we saw on their page. We can point out our common interests, background, industry, career or personal experiences. If that weren't enough, there's one more great feature. Each personal page has a guestbook and there is a culture that supports signing a person's guestbook as an initial overture. On Ryze, it is OK in fact encouraged to sign a complete stranger's guestbook. And, usually, the stranger will return the favor and check your personal page out and write some kind of reply. You are off and running now if the chemistry goes well with the guestbook exchange.

Building Trust and Comfort: As you can see, it's pretty easy and comfy getting these relationships started. There are a couple neat mechanisms for this next phase. On Ryze, you don't list your phone or email address in the real world on your page. However, you can choose to share this information with someone when you feel comfortable doing so or think it would be more convenient this way. It's an act of trust to do so. You are trusting your new "friend" to use your contact information responsibly. At some point you can declare a person to be a "friend" and add them to your friends list. They may or may not choose to put you on their friends list - these are personal decisions.

Exchanging Knowledge, contacts and support: Since Ryze is a self-declared business networking environment, people expect to network. And that means more than just building a network. Our common understanding and certainly Ryze's definition of networking also implies helping and sharing with each other. It's commonplace for people to offer to help you and to favorably look upon requests for help. This would be true in a "real world" networking situation, though, what's special here? There's a prominent place on each personal page for you to put what you HAVE to offer and what you WANT. Let's make it explicit. This is modifiable so you can change these depending on what you have and want right now. You can effortlessly search for people who have what you want or want what you have.

I'm currently a paying member of Ryze. This is the first of the new breed of online communities that I've tried out with some degree of commitment. I've just touched on some of the highlights of the Ryze environment - there's lots more. Ryze is great but I'm still curious about what else is out there. You'll hear about my discoveries here. If I've peaked your interest about Ryze, though, do come by my personal page and say hi in my guestbook!

May 25, 2003

OK, things are going pretty well. We don't have to go to networking groups and meet strangers if we don't want to. We don't even have to cold call or warm call to strangers. Life is good!

I said that this sort of gated online community called Ryze would smooth over the rough edges of this networking thing. Ryze, like a lot of other new networking or community-building kinds of web sites, is an emerging phenomenon - it has a life of its own and is constantly evolving. Plus, similar sites are springing up and each has it's own particular nature and feel. Here's a brief list of some of the competition: Friendster, blogging communities like Live Journal and Radio Userland, LinkedIn, Ecademy, Friends Reunited, There and Everyone's Connected.

Let's remember again, why we are doing this. We aren't getting onto the internet and futzing around with an online community just for the fun of it you know. This is serious! ;-) We are doing this because we want a way to more easily identify and connect with kindred spirits for our mutual benefit. We are looking to activate the field of dreams we've been talking about. Humans are social beings - we want and even need to socialize. Maybe we as individuals are going for two things in all this, then: (1) we want to socialize with people we really like and resonate with and (2) we want to trade knowledge, opinions and support with them once we know and trust them enough to feel comfortable doing so.

So, the fraternizing in item #1 is potentially really enjoyable, but right now let's stay on track and look at what needs to happen to get the knowledge, connection and support benefits of item #2. To do this, we need to (1) find the "right" people, (2) get to know them and (3) establish trust and (4) feel comfortable. Ryze business networking operates on and enables these things. Let's look at the first task and see how Ryze works:

Identifying People: There are many ways that Ryze helps here. Everyone has their own home page and this allows people to reveal themselves to others including photographs plus a lot of identifying information like current town, home town, schools attended, companies worked for, positions held and interests. For paying members (up to $10/mo.) these words are all clickable hyperlinks that find other Ryzlings who match that interest, home town, etc. A general search function allows you to find on any word you want. The only real hitch here is whether or not people feel safe enough to reveal information about themselves in this environment and whether or not enough people find this kind of thing worth doing. [To be continued].

May 22, 2003

When I think of networking, the first thing that comes to mind is attending a leads group or some kind of networking event where you smile, pass out your business card and introduce yourself over and over. It's always seemed like something I should do to market myself and get new clients but when I've tried it, it's felt awkward, artificial and 'em painful. So I decided a few years ago that networking events weren't my thing.

But, now I know about the small world phenomenon and I want to get all the goodies at the end of the six degrees of separation rainbow. And I suspect that activating my field of dreams has something to do with building up my network - or networking - the N word. Do I really have to go to those awful events to get all the goodies? Let's look.

Nope. You don't have to be physically present with someone to network with them. Phew! That was a close call for a second there. Even in the "old" days you could always write a letter to someone to acknowledge their work or to introduce yourself. Or you could pick up the phone and call - we call this "cold calling". Letter writing to network - maybe. But "cold calling" sounds as bad or worse than going to a live networking event for the first time. Letter-writing and then calling is warmer, but how much fun is it, really?

The modern equivalent to writing a letter to network-at-a-distance would be writing an email. Emails are instantaneous. They are less formal - sometimes that's a plus, sometimes not. You can send a bunch of them at once - and that might possibly work as long as you have an angle that makes your email not seem like spam. Without getting stuck on the spam question, we can just note that if you already have some relationship to the person you are writing to and you aren't making a blatant commercial proposal, you'll probably make it past the spam police and your email will arrive without tremendous stigma and will perhaps be read. Minus a previous relationship, you may not have a high "response rate" as they say in the direct marketing world. Bottom line: email is incredibly convenient, can't live without it, but there are more ways to network-at-a-distance and some of them should at least augment your email networking campaign should you undertake one.

With all this fancy internet stuff, isn't there a better [read easier] way? I've got one for you. Remember, the gated online community called Ryze that I referred to a while back, well I think it's a better and easier way. Oops, we are running out of room in this post - blog posts need to be bite-sized chunks, you know. I'm sorry. Come back soon for part 2.

May 15, 2003

On Tuesday, we started talking about the small world phenomenon. I, at least, started getting excited about this field of dreams that stretches out all around us - globally - and is navigated through weak or loose ties. I'm ready. What can we do to activate this field of dreams right now?

Part of the formula is having a personal web page of some sort. There needs to be a place in cyberspace where you can be discovered. Where you can reveal yourself, your interests, your accomplishments, your ideas, and yes, even your computers, cars, pets, children and mates if you so choose.Why is this so important? Because it is perfect for developing weak ties!

In my business, it looks something like this. A prospective client finds me in one of five ways: (1) in an online directory such as the one on the FileMaker site, (2) through Google or another search engine (3) my little Ad in the FileMaker Resource Directory that comes in the box with FileMaker software, (4) a news item about a new update or a review on the Net or (5) someone recommends me personally (more on word of mouth later). Except for avenue #5, these other sources leave my prospective client in the dark.

She doesn't know me from Adam. Except, she can go to my website, see what I look like, where I live, that I like football and am a Raiders and 49ers fan, how well-kept my site is and even get a feel for my philosophy and business practices. She can begin to grok me - enter my world a bit and kick the tires. That's a weak tie already, albeit a one-way tie. My prospective client now feels like she or he knows me well enough and knows that it is safe and inviting (or not) to call or email me to see whether or not we might want to do business together...

Sometime soon, I'll tell you a little about Ryze, a sort of gated online community for business networking. Because the community has some barriers to entry and privacy is scrupulously controlled, people feel more comfortable opening up on their personal web pages.

May 13, 2003

It's not new news in the world of science and the world at large that we are all connected by six or fewer degrees of acquaintance with anyone else on the planet. But here on the Net, social software is hot and everyone is talking about six degrees of separation otherwise known as the small world phenomenon.

Until recently, I just assumed that it would be my close relationships that would bring me the information and opportunities I've been looking for, but this new science of networking says different. It is our bare acquaintances, our friends of acquaintances, who can play crucial roles in our lives. These kinds of relationships are called weak or loose ties.

The people we hang out with don't often give us the breakthrough contacts or information we want because, generally speaking, we know the same people and the same information that they know. However, each of our friends, belongs to other networks that we don't belong to. And in those small tangential worlds, people and conversations - just out of earshot, so to speak, may have something of great value for us if only we could get access to them. Those perfect job leads, apartments, ideal mates and business deals are within your field of six degrees of separation...

That's where the internet and social software come in. Suddenly, it seems, developers are coming out of the woodwork proffering new communities, tools and services that promise to give us an unprecedented level of access to these, just out of reach, riches of information and introduction. These new tools and services grease the wheels of social interaction at a distance so that we can activate this field of dreams through our interests, backgrounds and circles of friends.